Arthur Scargill - a man among the people

As part of the build up to this Friday's 'Day of Action', Unite the Union, invited legendary Trade Union leader Arthur Scargill to Ireland for a series of talks. Before his talk to a packed Matt Merrigan Hall, Indymedia caught up with Scargill to chat about the Miners' Strike of 1984/85 and other contemporary issues such as January's Lidnsey oil refinery strike, which Scargill supported, a strike which caused much debate on the left with the use of the slogan 'British Jobs for British Workers'.

Kevin Brannigan – Folk singer Billy Bragg recently said, “Today’s economic crisis started on March 3rd 1985, the day the Miners were defeated.” Do you support this view?

Arthur Scargill – No. Billy Bragg unfortunately has moved to the right instead of moving to the left. Billy Bragg supported the Miners in 1984/85 and indeed did a lot of things which were very positive, but I think his analysis is completely wrong. The position is that the Labour and Trade Union movement failed to understand in 1984/85 that this was not just a matter of a dispute between an industry and a trade union, this was a fight promoted by the Tory government to try and destroy trade unionism.

Windmills mark the line of the Great Retreats

Seventy years after the Battle of the Ebro the dead remain unburied and the ghosts of Franco's dictatorship still haunt the landscape. Indymedia investigates...

Related Links:
A Catalan blogger's post on the remains in the Terra Alta | An English translation of Elies 115's original post | Website for the old town of Corbera | The official state-sponsored website for the Battle of the Ebro

Get Up Stand Up

Marching Is Not Enough, Organise for a general strike

Related Links:
Workplaces March to November 6th Protest venues | Updated list of workplaces walking out and services affected on November 6th Day Of Action | ICTU GET UP STAND UP | ICTU: National Day of Action

M30: Make Indymedia The Source For Struggle

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ ‘Get Up Stand Up’ protest on Friday 6th November is of huge importance. The government have made it clear that they intend to make ordinary workers pay for the financial crisis. Friday can be the start of us finally standing up and saying that we are not going to accept this.

Huge efforts have been made by politicians and economic commentators in recent months to drive a wedge between private sector workers and public sector workers. Friday provides us with an opportunity to demonstrate that they have been unsuccessful and that workers will stand together and defend our common interests.

Down with this sort of thing!

Thanks to the publication of a British police intelligence "spotter card" issued to rank & file coppers for a climate change protest in 2007 this week by a British newspaper, many people regardless of whether they are activists in the UK or Ireland or indeed elsewhere in the EU are wondering about their constitutional and statutory rights in the face of the European wide creation of intelligence databases by police forces. Whereas those whose images appeared without prior consent in this week's British media may have recourse to legal action and a bit of chatter, Irish political activists, protesters & ordinary citizens thus far enjoy no public recognition of the existence of such databases in Ireland nor it would appear have any mechanism to ensure that their details if not guilty of any criminal offence are removed from the intelligence files of the Garda Siochana.

Related Link:
Original Article from The Guardian: Doth I Protest Too Much?

Yes to Irish, Blacks, and Dogs. NO to the BNP

As this article is published the leader of the BNP, England's neo-fascist racist political party & one of the principle articulators of European neo-nazism in the English language has entered the BBC studios in London to take part in a BBC "question time" broadcast. The presence of Griffin has not gone without protest or reaction in Britain as much as in Ireland. This article collates much of the recent coverage of that reaction & puts this week's publishing on the internet on "Wikileaks" of the current BNP membership list in context.

But the point of this article is to examine from a leftist and Irish perspective the possible consequences of the BBC invitation to Griffin and the reaction in the liberal English chattering classes and at parliamentary level. Rather than moving to a revamping of the Race Relations Act the British it seems are considering a return to the censorship which was applied to the factions of the north of Ireland in general and Sinn Fein in particular.